What do you buy when you’re the Spectre that has everything?

The idea is that I’m the last one playing the first installment of the trilogy. But in case I’m not, I am reaching the end of the game so here’s a spoiler alert for the content below. If you’d like to go back and read the rest of this thread here you go:

Part One–Part Two–Part Three–Part Four

All the pieces have fallen into place. Or should I say, I made them fit. Fifty side quests, DONE. Including one that stayed out of my reach for longer than I would have liked.

There’s a side quest called Besieged Base that only opens up when your Paragon bar over eighty percent full. Now, you’d think that goal would be easy to reach. But it’s not. I promise you it’s not. Because I had a hard time with it, and I’m a nice person in this game. No, better than that, I’m a friggin’ saint. When I had a mere five hundred credits, I gave an Opold enough money to buy a license so he could spread his little squid balloon gospel in the Citadel.

Okay, well…I’m not perfect. There was an, er, incident on Noveria that set me back twenty-four paragon points. How was I supposed to know that if I snoop in a restricted area, everyone in the whole damn facility would open fire on me, scientists and all?! I was just looking! There wasn’t even a discussion or a, hey, what are you doing in here? So, I may have ended up killing a lot of people there. But I swear it was in self-defense!

From there on out, it didn’t seem to matter how much I did, it just wasn’t adding up. I avoided moving the storyline forward so I could complete all the side quests, because at a certain point there’s no turning back. After all that, after forty-nine side quests full of good will with a maxed out charisma bar, I think it was at seventy-nine percent. My head nearly exploded.

I’d given up, and went about going to Virmire to move the plot ahead, fully believing that it was all over. But no! More Paragon points! And after that battle, I still had the freedom to use my galaxy map and finally travel to Chohe, the planet that suddenly appears when you’ve been good enough to open up the quest. On Chohe I proceeded to earn more Paragon points and grab a ridiculous amount of gear.

This led me to sell so much equipment that I maxed out how much money I could have. It’s almost disappointing you can’t reach ten million credits. But I’ll have to settle for nine million nine hundred ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine credits. Say that five times fast.

I liked to imagine that somewhere on The Normandy, there was a giant Scrooge McDuck money pit you could go swimming in if the mood so struck you. I would have installed it in the engine room, where the light from the reactor would glitter nicely off the golden coins. The best part is that it wasn’t even from greed that I obtained all the loot: it was from helping so many people. Sometimes, good does pay. Literally.